Built-in Level Editor

Besides, you can tile tileset. Just Open Photoshop and do something like this.

<img src="http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h53/Sodisna/example1.png">

Tile 'em in a square use a number that is power by ^2. (I.E. 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, etc)

Then when your down. Just select the background and make something other than the colors you're using in your tiles.

<img src="http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h53/Sodisna/example2.png">

Boom. Import into Construct, set the tile to 64x64 (which what I used. You'd used whatever you set your tiles too.) and hit cut tiles. Select all the tiles, set a hotspot, select the mask color (which would be whatever you set your tile's BG color to.) and you're all set.

Yeh, I agree. I am into making rpg games. when mapping with Construct is the painful things to do and time consuming.

I wouldn't call Construct's level editor bad or inferior to GM's - even for tileset-based stuff. You just need to be wise about how to use your tileset - a combination of tiled background objects and sprites with sprite index works wonders for level creation.

The initial set-up time might be a bit longer, but once you have established the base, building things becomes quite fast - if you need something, it's very quick to just select one or multiple objects already existing in the level and ctrl+drag a copy of it in the new place. Maybe change one tile here and there, and tweak the width/height of some tiled backgrounds using the snap resizing to grid -function as help.

Take this tileset and starry sky here for example:

<img src="http://planar-studios.com/bin/tileset.png"><img src="http://planar-studios.com/bin/bgstars.png">

In relatively short time I came up with this:

<img src="http://planar-studios.com/bin/pixelevel.png">

It takes use of all the stuff I mentioned earlier, plus filters, layers and rotation for ease of work. Looks pretty slick, huh? It's very easy to expand as well when you already have stuff laying around in the layout - just ctrl+drag a copy of one or multiple things and do some little tweaking. I'd say it's quite a lot faster than selecting tiles from tileset every time when you want to add a different tile.

Here's the cap too:

http://planar-studios.com/bin/tilesetting.cap

That's a nice example of use Daiz! It will be helpfull ^^

But returning to the main issue, I also liked a lot drawing the tiles, (years ago I used to play a lot with RPG Maker, it had a wonderful tile system despite all else), but what about instead of including such a mode/feature, just import a tiled map from another software, like Tiled.

Here is the link:

http://www.mapeditor.org/

As far as I know, what it does is enable you to load a tileset, and when finished drawing, it export to a usable (?) formats, maybe just importing this format and the tileset would be more than enough, I'm just saying.

just use tiled backgrounds and stretch them, then drag individual sprites or single squared TiledBGs for detail work

painting a whole bunch of sprites isnt a good idea anyway, from my experience using individual objects for large expanses of tiles lags the game quite a bit unless you implement optmisations using events.

I would pay good money if Construct had a tile-based level editor or mode ;P (eh? EH?)

No, really. Some of the current layout editor's features are nice and all, but still useless when it comes to tiles. Imagine you want to make something like Super Metroid or any other game that uses HUNDREDS of tiles. You're telling me this is easy in Construct? I'm sorry but I have to disagree. You CAN use a sprite, import frames, cut into tiles, duplicate about 500 of them, name the starting frames, then painstakingly ctrl+drag or hold left click+enter to place them but c'mon I have a game to get to here. I'm currently making an NES style game and I still need to use programs such as Tiled if I want to live to see my levels finished

Maybe just add frames support for TiledBackground Oject? It will allow to load whole tile sheets in one TiledBackground object and simple change frames in editor to use different tiles.

(P.S. Excuse me for my english)